The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Network service providers need techniques for providing end-to-end quality of service (QoS) assurance to customers for traffic that transits multi-domain networks. Multi-domain networks are networks that span multiple autonomous systems or multiple service providers. QoS assurance data is generally useful for verification in comparison to metrics that are specified in a Service Level Agreement (SLA). For proper verification, end-to-end (E2E) measurement of QoS at each segment of the multi-domain network from a source to a destination is desired. For example, a particular enterprise may use Internet service that spans multiple different service providers or multiple different autonomous systems of one service provider and the enterprise desires to have assurance that all the service providers or autonomous systems are complying with an SLA that the enterprise has entered into. To achieve this, given a destination IP prefix (such as 128.0.0.0/8), network service providers desire to collect performance data from a source network node to a destination node, collecting data at each network segment towards the destination.
However, providing such end-to-end data collection has been a challenge for several reasons. First, the networks involved in the collection path belong to multiple autonomous systems (AS) and are not owned or operated by the same entity. Second, a source collector may need to discover all the intermediate collectors towards the destination, or at least, know about the next hop to which the collection request can be forwarded, but this information is not readily available when the intermediate collectors are in another autonomous system. Finally, using a centralized scheme may not be feasible and desirable. Typically, measurement and collection use centralized network management systems.
Optimized Exit Routing, commercially available from Cisco Systems, Inc., San Jose, Calif., enables a router having multiple exit points to one or more different SPs to select an optimized exit point. However, OER is not distributed. OER is hosted in the customer premises rather than within a service provider network. OER cannot provide end-to-end performance collection or data measurement, and OER only collects data related to BGP traffic, but not all performance metrics in which a service provider may be interested.